


Earth-bound Misfit, I

by adreadfulidea



Category: Maleficent (2014)
Genre: F/F, Underage - Freeform, but very innocent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 19:56:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1830340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreadfulidea/pseuds/adreadfulidea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can take a fairy's wings from her. But not forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Earth-bound Misfit, I

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a lyric from the Pink Floyd song 'Learning to Fly'.

Fairies have delicate, gossamer wings like iridescent water. They flit from flower to flower the way butterflies do, petals on the wind, or dart dragonfly-quick.

Maleficent does not fly like a butterfly. She flies like a bird of prey, a hawk, an eagle. Her wings are huge and powerful. They can blow a man off a battlefield. She cuts through the sky like a knife.

(Later she will dream of flight and wake screaming.)

 

She does not understand the human world. Their greed and their ambition, their ceaseless striving for things they do not need - only to die, a pile of bones buried beneath the earth, so that it made no difference at all. They waste what life they have, and a sorry life it seems. No magic for them, only iron swords that burn and looming ugly castles off in the distance. Some have so much and others so little. No fairy would be that unfair to another.

She does not understand the human world. But she will.

 

Everything changes without her wings. The pain is unimaginable. Her balance is off and every step feels plodding, cumbersome, because she cannot launch herself skyward. She longs for impossible things - the wind on her face and in her hair, the thrill of pitching towards the ground only to pull up at the last moment. She envies the birds in the trees.

Her wounds heal (her wounds never heal).

The moors change most of all. Flowers die. Thorns spring up, big enough to shred skin. The night lasts longer, is darker.

The other fairies start to fear her. They should.

 

The child is a persistent little annoyance. She refuses to be afraid of perfectly reasonable things. She climbs up rotten tree branches and down steep hills, plunges into the turbulent river for a bit of a swim, charms the bees so that they make honey just for her. The forest is her playground. She _sings_.

Maleficent is disgusted, of course.

Diaval is full of useless opinions and he likes to share them with all and sundry. “She’s grown up to be such a pretty girl,” he says, sounding every inch a proud Papa. “Don’t you think?”

Maleficent leaves him a raven for a whole week as punishment.

 

I take it back, thinks Maleficent frantically. _I take it back I take it back_.

It doesn’t help anything. Aurora sleeps on, dead to the world.

 

Aurora runs to Maleficent across the moors, skirt bunched in her hands. A crowd of pixies follows her and her crown is slipping sideways. Maleficent _tsks_ under her breath and straightens it.

The girls cares not for crowns; the girl cares not for power. This is why she should have both.

Aurora hands the crown off to one of her attendants, who sags under the weight of it. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are sparkling. “Up,” she says to Maleficent, holding out her arms.

Maleficent flies as straight and true as an arrow, her arms around Aurora’s waist. She weighs nothing at all. Her fair hair whips around her face and she yells in joy and triumph. They go up, up, up - plunging into the clouds, the cold air churning around them like a whirlwind.

 

(And if their lips touch in the heavens, far away from the gossiping voices below, it is no one’s business but their own.)

 

 


End file.
